Roundup: Touch of Color Monitor Series from Samsung. Page 10

Samsung engineers have always been by far among the best when it comes to exterior monitor design. However, they have absolutely outdone themselves in the Samsung Touch of Color aka ToC series. We are going to talk about 6 monitors from this series ranging from 19" to 26".

SyncMaster T260

The 26-inch SyncMaster T260 is the last model in the Touch of Color series. It has the same formal specifications as the T240, except for the size of the screen. Thus, it has a HDMI input, two audio outputs, and an integrated USB hub.

By default, this monitor has 100% brightness and 75% contrast. I selected 40% brightness and 42% contrast to achieve a 100nit brightness of white. The monitor regulates its brightness by means of backlight modulation at a frequency of 180Hz.

Color gradients are reproduced perfectly, without banding.

The color gamut is standard, nearly coinciding with the sRGB color space.

This model features good uniformity of brightness. The average nonuniformity of white brightness is as low as 3.7% with a maximum of only 11.0%. For black brightness, the average and maximum nonuniformity is 5.9% and 17.0%.

The gamma curves are separate from each other and the theoretical curve at the default settings.

The curves improved at the reduced settings, yet are still quite far from perfect.

Funnily enough, the ToC series models alternate in the quality of their color temperature setup. The T190 is good, the T200 bad, the T220 good again, etc. The T260 complies with this rule. Its color temperature setup is awful. The temperature dispersion among the different grays is as large as 1000 degrees and more.

Trying to improve the monitor’s color reproduction, I lowered Contrast to 40% and set the color temperature sliders as R=67, G=50 and B=32. However, dark gray still remained much colder than white as you can see in the Custom column of the table above.

Besides the difference in grays, the CIE diagram shows a shift towards greens. The shift gets larger in the warmer modes.

The max brightness and contrast ratio are quite ordinary.

The MagicBright modes are distinctly different, but the first two – Text and Internet – are too bright to be used for the intended applications. I would recommend you to set the monitor up manually for comfortable brightness, switch into the Text mode for viewing photos and use the Internet or brighter modes for games and movies.

Talking about color reproduction, the Game mode, which is the brightest one, has a bend in the top right part of the blue curve, indicating excessive contrast. This defect can hardly be perceived with a naked eye, though.

The gamma curves look no worse than at the monitor’s default settings even in Movie mode, let alone the less bright modes.

The monitor does not have response time compensation so its response time average is a modest 14.9 milliseconds (GtG) with a maximum of 25.1 milliseconds.

While the failure of the T220P could be explained by the presale sample, the failure of the T200 by problems of the particular sample, the T260 leaves no room for further indulgence. It is a third monitor from the ToC series whose setup is very far from ideal, to put it mildly.